Prof. Dr. Kathy Yelick

Katherine Yelick is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley and the Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She is known for her research in parallel languages, compilers, algorithms, libraries, architecture, and runtime systems. She co-invented the UPC and Titanium languages and developed analyses, optimizations, and runtime systems for their implementation. Her work also includes memory hierarchy optimizations, communication-avoiding algorithms, and automatic performance tuning, including the first autotuned sparse matrix library. She earned her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has been on the faculty of UC Berkeley since 1991 with a joint research appointment at Berkeley Lab since 1996. She was the director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) from 2008 to 2012 and in her current role as Associate Laboratory Director she manages a 300-person organization that includes NERSC, the Energy Science Network (ESNet), and the Computational Research Division. She has received multiple research and teaching awards, including the Athena award, and she is an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Senior member. She has served on study committees for the National Research Council and is a member of the California Council on Science and Technology, the National Academies Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, and the Science and Technology Board overseeing research at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.